Life and science at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

Climate Change

...now browsing by category

Baby oysters are a lot stronger than they look. Living mainly in shallow coastal waters, where oxygen plummets and acidity spikes on a nightly basis, building a decent shell should be a challenge. But after a couple of weeks, young oysters are often able to adjust to the harsh conditions—and, sometimes, even grow more quickly to make up for lost time.

“It’s really impressive what these oysters are able to do in terms of acclimating to potentially harmful conditions,” said lead author Andrew Keppel, who worked on the project as a graduate student and later technician in SERC’s Marine Ecology Lab, before becoming an oceanography lab manager at the U.S. Naval Academy. Click to continue »

Middle school can be a tough and unforgiving rite of passage, filled with raging hormones, ill-fitting highwater pants, voices akin to trumpet-wielding geese, and a multitude of distractions. Trying to learn while being swept up in puberty’s turbulence can be challenging. Equally challenging is trying to teach science to often-distracted tweens and teens. Right now, as most U.S. schools begin a new school year, some science educators might be looking for ways to engage their middle-school students with science. One science educator suggests meeting them where their interests lie – comics.

SERC biogeochemist Pat Megonigal holds up soil from a marsh in Costa Rica. Marsh soils store vast amounts of carbon, but as temperatures warm, microbes in the soil could release into the atmosphere. (SERC)

by Kristen Minogue

All over the world, marshes are hanging in a precarious balance. Rising temperatures from climate change could help them grow stronger and store more carbon—or cause them to flood and disappear, says a new article from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). To find answers, scientists need to look underground.

The article is part of a much larger report on the future of warming oceans, released Monday at the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s annual conference. Tidal marshes sit right on the boundary of the land and the ocean. For humanity, marshes act as Mother Nature’s guardians. They provide habitat for fish and shellfish, filter out pollution in estuarine water, and help shield homes along the coast from flooding. They’re also hot spots of carbon storage, burying carbon 10 times faster than an equal area of forest. Yet much of their fate remains a mystery. Click to continue »

You might have heard of The Giving Tree, a children’s picture book by Shel Silverstein about a boy and a tree. As the boy grew, he began to want more from the tree, and the tree happily gave and gave and gave: her apples, her branches, and even her trunk. While Silverstein’s heartbreaking story was a fiction, the plot is happening in wetlands around the world—and this time, it’s for real. Marshes improve water quality, mitigate hurricane damage, sequester atmospheric carbon, and serve as ideal habitats and nurseries for wildlife. In return, as sea levels rise, they’re in line to be the first casualties.

SERC intern Jefferson Riera shows off his sunburn after a day in the field. (Photo: Emily Li/SERC)

That said, marshes are hardly a serene paradise. To Smithsonian Environmental Research Center intern Jefferson Riera, wetlands are ruined shoes caked in mud. Wetlands are wasp stings on his lips. Wetlands are spider webs of scratches from marsh vegetation. Wetlands are sunburns so severe his skin doesn’t match itself anymore.

And yet, he knows that they’re worth protecting. That’s why he, and the rest of SERC’s Ecological Modeling Lab, are working to develop a baseline understanding of local marsh elevation to educate policymakers on the state of wetlands—before their fates are sealed by the sea.

Watching educational programs like Animal Planet or That’s My Baby—a series that documents pregnant animals—might evoke memories of flickering classroom projectors for most. But for Jasmin Graham, an intern with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), these shows were her childhood. Her love for marine science and wildlife followed her through high school science fairs and university research on shark genetics at the College of Charleston. Now, at an internship with SERC’s Ocean Acidification Lab, she studies acidification not in the open ocean, but in a far more dramatic arena, where the marine celebrities she grew up with may be at risk.

Each caterpillar began life as a half gram of green clay, with a wire spine and ends rolled into a worm-like silhouette. By the time Nordseth had finished—several podcasts and three seasons of House of Cards later—she had 900 caterpillars and the hand cramps to prove it. But she was ready to begin her research.

Just beneath our feet, there’s a slumbering pool of carbon that has largely been ignored.

Earth’s deep soils store vast reservoirs of carbon centuries to millennia old. Left undisturbed, they can store that carbon for thousands of years longer. But if triggered, those reservoirs could release carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, a team of scientists discovered in a new study from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

Last fall, while volunteering in a plant lab at George Washington University in D.C., I heard about an experiment that was starting up at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). The project, a global warming simulation in the wetlands surrounding the Chesapeake Bay, was helmed by SERC research ecologist Roy Rich, an ecologist with an engineer’s mindset. I’ve been a wetlands enthusiast since I spotted my first blue Heron as a kid, and global climate change is, in my mind, the most pressing issue humans face today. I was ready to sign up. I met with Roy and asked the same questions I have since answered over and over again since joining the project in November:

Joe Dawson checks a control box for the underground heating cables that help raise temperature in the marsh plots. (Kristen Minogue/SERC)

Fish provide protein to billions of people and are an especially critical food source in the developing world. Today, marine biologists confirmed a key factor that could help them thrive through the coming decades: biodiversity. Communities with more fish species are more productive and more resilient to rising temperatures and temperature swings, according to a new study from the Smithsonian’s Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network and other international institutions.

The accelerating loss and rearrangement of species all over the globe have troubled scientists and the public for decades. But the question of whether biodiversity offers practical value—for humans and ecosystems—remained controversial. The new study, published May 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers the most thorough proof yet that preserving marine biodiversity can benefit people as much as it benefits the oceans.

“Biodiversity is more than a pretty face,” said lead author Emmett Duffy, director of the Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network and senior scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. “Preserving biodiversity is not just an aesthetic or spiritual issue—it’s critical to the healthy functioning of ecosystems and the important services they provide to humans, like seafood.”

Inland silverside (Menidia beryllina) reflected in aquarium. When threatened with low oxygen, fish often swim to the surface, where oxygen is more abundant but predators can more easily spot them. (SERC)

Severe oxygen drops in the water can leave trails of fish kills in their wakes, but scientists thought adult fish would be more resilient to the second major threat in coastal waters: acidification. A new study published Tuesday from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) shows that is not entirely true—where fish are concerned, acidification can make low oxygen even more deadly.